FILM REVIEW: 24 DAYS By: Faiz No comments

Ruth (Zabou Breitman) in 24 Days.

Poor Jew

By Ed Rampell

Director Alexandre Arcady’s taut, suspenseful new film, 24 Days, is like the similarly monikered now-defunct Fox TV series, 24, in that it deals with torture within a set period of time.

However, 24 Days is based on a real life tragedy: The January 2006 abduction in Paris of French Jew Ilan Halimi (portrayed by Syrus Shahidi), a cell phone salesman of Morrocan ancestry. Arcady shares the screenwriting credits with Antoine Lacomblez and Emilie Freche, who co-wrote with Ruth Halimi (played by Zabou Breitman in the movie) a book called 24 Days, The Truth on Ilan Halimi’s Death.

Using a very realistic style, Arcady’s probing camera takes us inside the kidnapping, from Sub-Saharan Africa to France. In addition to being a policier, 24 Days is also an intense family drama. The Halimis seem like a very close knit family, although Ruth (Zabou Breitman) and Didier Halimi (Pascal Elbe) are actually divorced, which adds to the already considerable amount of tension. This leads towards the acting being occasionally overwrought in a few scenes: How many crying babies and screaming sisters, mother, etc., can a viewer stand?

The film is gripping with a political subtext and reminiscent of Costa-Gavras. 24 Days implies that the bungling police were extremely incompetent in carrying out their investigation and attempts to rescue Halimi. Most importantly, the movie explores the big question as to whether Ilan's kidnapping and abuse while being held prisoner was an act of anti-Semitism? The authorities try long and hard to deny this -- but others thought differently, including Ruth.

Arcady has a North-African background similar to Ilan's -- the director was born in Algeria and is also Jewish. He moved from Algiers to France when he was 15 and many of his movies have focused on Jewish issues and subjects, hence his interest in l’affaire Halimi. However, if 24 Days is indeed asserting that Ilan's hijacking was because of anti-Semitism, Arcady’s dramatization does not make a very convincing, strong case.

In terms of motive, there is only a very quick specific Islamicist reference and the inept kidnappers appear to be acting more on the basis of greed than on hatred per se for Jews. Yes, they targeted Ilan because he was Jewish, but not out of contempt for the Chosen People, but due to their foolish belief that all Jews are rich. So while Ilan's abductors did indeed act under the impression of a false stereotype of Jews, they did not seem to be motivated by a deep seated hatred per se of Jews, unlike inquisitors, Nazis, Islamicist extremists and other fanatics since Biblical days. The movie does not suggest that overzealous Zionist militaristic policies vis-à-vis the  Palestinians and the like provoked the body snatchers. They just wanted to make a fast, easy buck but stupidly chose a wrong target because they ignorantly believed an incorrect, idiotic caricature of Jews.

Of course, France has a history of persecution of the Jews, notably the notorious Dreyfus affair and the roundup of Jews and collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation and the Holocaust.  As said, the Ilan events played out in 2006 and they indicate the ongoing precarious position of French Jews -- and, perhaps, of members of this long despised minority group everywhere. The resulting roundup of alleged abductors -- mostly or all non-white, in French ghettoes -- can also be seen in a different context in 2015.
 

 

 

OUTFEST 2014: SARAH PREFERS TO RUN By: Faiz No comments

Sarah (Sophie Desmarais) in Sophie Prefers to Run.

That running and loneliness thing

By Miranda Inganni

Sarah (Sophie Desmarais) doesn’t just prefer to run, the 20-year-old lives to run in director Chloe Robichaud’s feature film debut, Sarah Prefers to Run.

Sarah’s mother (Hélène Florent) opposes her daughter’s plans on moving to Montreal to run at McGill University, pointing out that running will not pay the bills. Fortunately for Sarah, her coworker, Antoine (Jean-Sébastien Courchesne), has enough money to get both of them to Montreal and into an apartment. However, once there Antoine suggests they marry to take advantage of government grants. Affable Antoine gets more domestic and comfortable with his roommate/wife, but Sarah seems oblivious and continues to focus on running. 

One of her teammates, Zoey (Geneviève Boivin-Roussy), catches Sarah’s eye and a slightly awkward friendship begins. Once Sarah begins to explore, or at least acknowledge, her sexuality, it becomes clear that she is not running toward anything, but rather away from herself. Things are further complicated when Sarah develops a heart condition, but will it stop her from running?

Desmarais does an exceptional job portraying the titular character in all of her youthful innocence cum lack of mindfulness. Sarah seems so removed from everything other than running. She is obsessively focused, even to the potential detriment to her health. 

Robichaud creates an ambiance of dullness for Sarah to live in, replete with a beige- gray color scheme and little dialogue. Sarah Prefers to Run is more of a character study than a typical dramatic narrative, but Sarah (well acted by Desmarais) is an interesting enough character to take a close look at as she follows the course of her life.

FILM REVIEW: MY PIECE OF THE PIE By: Faiz No comments

France (Karin Viard) in My Piece of the Pie.

Sliced

By Don Simpson

Writer-director Cédric Klapisch's My Piece of the Pie  (Ma part du gateau) begins in Dunkirk with a birthday cake yet amidst the celebration, France (Karin Viard) attempts suicide. The quite purposefully named France is a single mother of three who is suffering from depression after the unexpected closure of the factory she had worked at for two decades.

Meanwhile in London, we learn that an evil power broker named Steve (Gilles Lellouche) recently closed a deal that prompted the shuttering of France’s employer. As a bonus, Steve accepts a job transfer that delivers him to Paris.

Meanwhile in Dunkirk, France — who is still recovering from her suicide attempt — cannot find another job; that is until she abandons her fellow factory workers and enters a housekeeper training program in Paris. The training program is designed for immigrants, so France must pretend that she is a foreigner so the other students do not get suspicious of national favoritism. (This could easily be interpreted as an anti-immigrant stance on behalf of Klapisch, as he “proves” to us that French Nationals actually want and deserve the lower class jobs that immigrants are stealing.)

Fate then rears its ugly hand and France is hired as Steve’s housekeeper. France — our working class heroine — is blinded by her income, especially as her salary multiplies upon becoming the nanny for Steve’s son (Lunis Sakji). France quickly learns that the millionaire lifestyle, however subservient her role may be, is not all that bad. Steve’s life, on the other hand, is devoted to the endless pursuit of profit at the expense of less privileged people, as My Piece of the Pie unspools into a cock-eyed message about how seemingly harmless business decisions have broader consequences than anyone could ever imagine. (Themes of financial accountability in this dog-eat-dog capitalist world come up again and again and again.)

And though she constantly ridicules Steve for not spending enough quality time with his son, France has all but abandoned her daughters in Dunkirk at the home of her sister (Audrey Lamy) in favor of spending more time with Steve’s son and thus making a lot more money. Nonetheless, we are supposed to believe that France is a decent, hard working woman who just so happens to have hit a lucky-yet-reckless streak. When France eventually sacrifices herself for her comrades at the factory back in Dunkirk, it is too little too late.

FILM REVIEW: The NAMES OF LOVE By: Faiz No comments

Baya Benmahmoud (Sara Forestier) in The Names of Love.

A well laid plan

By Ed Rampell

George Carlin, that brilliant comic wordsmith, once quipped that if he had invented the slogan “make love, not war,” he would have gone to the beach for the rest of his life, presumably because he would have already made such an important contribution to humanity that his life would be justified and would no longer require any further contributions from him. 

In the daffy The Names of Love leftwinger Bahia Benmahmoud (the to-die-for Sara Forestier) takes this expression to its extreme, making love with reactionary men precisely so they won’t make war, and otherwise exploit, oppress, etc., their fellow human beings. This is only natural for this activist, a political extremist (although not of the bomb tossing variety -- despite the fact that she’s what used to be quaintly called a “sex bomb”), who calls people she disagrees with “fascists” with the frequency American teenagers say “like.”

Simply put, this lefty madcap comedy may very well be the best new movie your erstwhile reviewer has seen on the big screen in years. Michel Leclerc’s The Names of Love has everything Francophiles and those of us who fancy ourselves to be cinephiles -- instead of fans or buffs! – expect and love in French films: Sexual obsession, nudity, gauchiste (leftist) politics, visual panache, tenderness, poignancy, etc. It is a worthy successor to that venerable French film movement called “Nouvelle Vague,” sort of combining Francois Truffaut’s tender romantic sensibility with Jean-Luc Godard’s agitprop politicking with Jacques Tati’s zany drollery. (Although in the context of this sexy movie morsel, the title of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows would take on a completely different meaning.) Going further back in the French arts, I wouldn’t be surprised if Moliere himself might have felt that this was the type of play he would have written, sans censorship.

The Names of Love is about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Algeria’s liberation struggle against French colonialism, being Arab in today’s France, sex, romance, the movement against French President Nicholas Sarkozy, but most of all it is about Bahia, a sexually emancipated half-Algerian beautiful young woman full of love (literally and figuratively) for all humanity. (Intriguingly, this is the second recent movie to depict a sexually free part-Algerian woman, the other being Now & Later, starring Shari Solanis.) Bahia is sort of the incarnation of that essential ingredient in French cinema: Joie de vivre. After her cute meets with the middle-aged Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin), the free spirited Bahia knows she cares about the animal-disease control government bureaucrat because she has sex with him, even though Arthur isn’t a rightwinger and he votes for the Socialists! (The Socialist party’s former presidential candidate, Lionel Jospin, has a very funny cameo.)

The Names of Love also deals with the post-traumatic stress disorders of Holocaust survivors and their offspring. Arthur’s mom Annette (the moving Michele Moretti) physically survived the Shoah, but she has never psychologically come to grips with the cost of losing her parents in Hitler’s death camps, a pain that has been passed down to Arthur. Similarly, Bahia’s father Mohamed still deals with surviving Algeria’s anti-colonial war for independence, and is thwarted from pursuing his true avocation, as a painter. (In the same way, a childhood trauma has affected Bahia, who sublimates her dream of playing piano into sexuality.)

This comedy is a laugh a minute and unlike most puritanical pictures in America, has lots of graphic nudity. (For instance, the U.S. documentary Orgasm Inc., about the quest for female Viagra, doesn’t reveal any nudity; a puppet is used as a stand in for vaginas. Good grief!) Bahia may be a bit ditzy, but this “political whore” (as Bahia calls herself) with a heart of gold and sexually liberated revolutionary may just be the Reichian dream girl, the ideal woman! Best of all, this sexually free woman isn’t made to “pay” for enjoying sex, which is one of the oldest, most tired clichés under the sun.

I have had some concerns about Bahia’s childhood incident and the treatment of it and of that other cliché – the older man with the much younger woman (no wonder Leclerc is such a Woody Allen fan!). But these are mere quibbles. Forestier deservedly won the Best Actress Cesar Award (France’s equivalent to the Oscars), while Leclerc and Baya Kasmi won the Best Original Screenplay Cesar. Leclerc says Love is autobiographical. If so, lucky him! And lucky you, dear viewer, if you go see this uplifting, lovely, lefty, French sex farce.

LAFF 2011: FAMILIAR GROUND By: Faiz No comments

A scene from Familiar Ground.

Non-Firma future

By Don Simpson  

Familiar Ground takes the LAFF 2011 cinema-goers who have seen The Salesman to very familiar territory -- the wintry snow-blanketed environs of Quebec -- but Familiar Ground abides by a far more quirkier and absurd approach to cinema. Additionally, The Salesman and Familiar Ground both feature a lead character named Maryse and a car crash plays prominently in both stories.

Benoit (Francis La Haye) is frozen in a perpetual state of adolescence residing with his father (Michel Daigle) -- his mother died five years ago -- in his suburban childhood home. One possibility of snapping Benoit out of his stagnant situation: Nathalie (Suzanne Lemoine), a single mother with whom Benoit is smitten (though his “I Like Girls Who Like Girls” t-shirt sends a different message) and hopes to cohabitate. The main hurdle for this endeavor is Nathalie's son, who strongly disapproves of Benoit's presence.

A dinner accented with wayward shards of glass ends in a heated argument with Nathalie. Benoit then takes out his aggression on an unsuspecting snowman and winds up with frostbite. Chapped hands soon become the least of Benoit's concerns, as a mysterious car salesman (Denis Houle) from the not-so-distant future (September, to be precise) delivers a chilling prophesy of Benoit's next few months: a blizzard, the death of a relative and a pleasant summer.

All the while, Benoit's sister, Maryse (Fanny Mallette), and her husband, Alain (Sylvain Marcel), are desperate to sell a backhoe. Winter is not the season for backhoes, so it sits unused in their suburban front yard. Already on edge as the result of a co-worker's accident at the local paper factory (prompting Maryse's strange fascination with the preservation of dismembered appendages), Maryse is frustrated by the constant sight of the machine and irrationally decides to rent a car to pick-up a trailer from her family's cabin in order to haul the backhoe away.

The news received by Benoit from the future leaves him concerned about Maryse taking the trip to the cabin on her own. Maryse and Benoit have historically not gotten along with each other -- they have never even had coffee together -- so the sibling road trip will certainly test their familiar bonds and is destined to change the trajectory of their lives.

Once at the cabin, Benoit is incapable of getting the heater to function or find suitable firewood. Benoit's foibles with his father's snowmobile provide us with another glimpse of Benoit's emasculating inadequacies. The siblings venture to a party next door; it is someone's birthday and fireworks are anticipated, yet Benoit dislikes fireworks almost as much as he hates watching his married sister flirt with guys who use shovels to open their beer bottles.

Writer-director Stéphane Lafleur's Familiar Ground is a stylistic mash-up of science fiction, absurdly off-kilter humor and the mundanity of everyday reality. The complexity of the tone is exaggerated even further by the eerie electronic score (by Sagor & Swing and We Are Wolves) and it is Lafleur's knack for odd comedic timing that truly drives the borderline surreal narrative structure of Familiar Ground.

Lafleur's comedic ingenuity is sublimely highlighted in the opening and closing of Familiar Ground. By listing the character name “L'Homme du futur” (Man from the future) in the film's opening credits, Lafleur thus spurs our anticipation of the revealing of this ambiguously named character. The closing image of a towering blue blow-up stick figure blowing in the wind while synchronized with an inspired musical choice (“The Bells of the Night” by The Red Army Choirs) spreads a finishing coat of quirkiness on Familiar Ground.

LAFF 2011: TOMBOY By: Faiz No comments

Laure (Zoé Héran) in Tomboy.

Gender bend-her

By Don Simpson

Upon returning from a summer retreat, Laure (Zoé Héran) joins her parents (Sophie Cattani and Mathieu Demy) and six-year-old sister, Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), at their new home. The new neighborhood means many things to Laure, including new friends, a new school, and a new identity.

From first glance, Laure’s gender is inconclusive. With her prepubescent, 10-year-old frame and short haircut, Laure can easily pass for a boy. From what we can gather, Laure has been a tomboy for quite a while. Laure prefers to dress like a boy and play with boys and her parents seem too distracted to notice -- Laure’s father is away at work for most of the film and her mother is practically bedridden by pregnancy.

Laure’s first friend in her new neighborhood is a girl named Lisa (Jeanne Disson). Laure introduces herself to Lisa as a boy -- Mikael -- totally naive to the fact that this charade cannot last forever. Lisa in turn introduces Mikael to the local kids and Mikael instantly blends right in with the other boys. We watch how Mikael learns by observing the other boys, co-opting their gender by mimicry. Soon, Mikael is playing soccer with her shirt off, getting into fisticuffs with other boys and kissing a girl. Mikael’s greatest hurdle is when she is invited to go swimming with the other kids because her makeshift pink swimsuit accentuates the fact that she does not have a penis. Luckily that is something a little green modeling clay can fix. As school registration approaches, it becomes increasingly obvious that Laure will not be able to maintain the facade of Mikael for much longer. The question remains: How badly is this going to end for Laure?

With Tomboy, writer-director Céline Sciamma delves much deeper into the taboo (at least on this side of the Atlantic) theme of childhood sexuality that she discussed all-so-eloquently in her 2007 feature-length debut, Water Lilies. Laure is five years younger than Water Lilies’ Marie (Pauline Acquart), Anne (Louise Blachère) and Floriane (Adèle Haenel); thus Laure is also significantly more innocent. The root of Laure’s deception is not about sexual attraction to girls -- though she does kiss a girl -- it is about wanting to play like a boy.

Tomboy thoughtfully discusses the prevailing pressure from society to conform to specific gender stereotypes -- even in acting like a boy, Laure abides by society’s predetermined definition of what a boy is. What is wrong with a 10-year old girl wanting to dress like a boy and play with boys? Why is that considered weird or abnormal? Is genitalia really the sole defining criteria for gender?

SFIFF 2011: CHILDREN OF THE PRINCESS OF CLEVES By: Faiz No comments

A scene from Children of the Princess of Cleves.

Text-ing times

By Miranda Inganni

In director Régis Sauder’s documentary, The Children of the Princess of Clèves (Nous, Princesses De Clèves), teenagers from a Marseilles high school learn about life and love from the classic French novel, The Princess of Clèves. Using the students to read excerpts from the book, reenact selections and discuss the subject matter with their friends and families, Sauder brings the 17^th century book to life in the 21^st century.

Proving some things are timeless, this documentary is an age-old story of children growing up – testing their boundaries and their parents patience and exploring their own emotions. Instead of the 16^th century royal court of Henri II, the backdrop is a contemporary working class community, but the themes are the same: love, passion, duty, disappointment, jealousy, betrayal, angst, et cetera.

And when the parents get involved in the discussion, it is clear that the kids, being teenagers, are not used to having these issues talked about at home. It’s quite laudable that Sauder gets the conversation going between parent and child during a time when the child is less like to talk and more likely to walk away. There are raw and revealing scenes where it’s clear that some of these young adults still want their parents’ affection and attention, all the while reaching out on their own and rebuking their elders.

Enriched by the ensemble of students featured in the film, The Children of the Princess of Clèves, culminates in the results of their baccalaureate exams. Some pass, some fail, some skip the exam entirely (without his or her parent’s consent or knowledge). In the end, the mobile texting kids seem to have learned a little more about themselves through the exploration of this text -- disproving what French President Nicholas Sarkozy said about it.